Today Papert is considered the world's foremost expert on how technology can provide new ways to learn. He has carried out educational projects all over the world. He is also a huge participant in developing the most influential cutting edge opportunities for children to participate all over the world. Papert lives in Maine, where he has founded a small laboratory called the Learning Barn to develop methods of learning that are too far ahead of the times for large-scale. He has been named distinguished professor by the University of Maine.
He spends a large part of his time working in the Maine Youth Center in Portland, the state's facility for teenagers convicted of serious offenses. Papert's contributions go beyond the field of education. He is also a mathematician and is a cofounder with Marvin Minsky of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT and a founding faculty member of the MIT Media Lab where he continues to work.
Here's a link to the website:
http://www.papert.org
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Spreadsheets
Paper based spreadsheets have been around for a long time. Basically they were being used for keeping records and for accounting. Spreadsheets has allowed teachers to adopt a middle course, compared to the extremes of fully coding an algorithm. Spreadsheets also concerns the absence of a number of desirable features, such as transportation of rows and columns, absence of regression lines on scatter graphs, and so on. All of these features are available in modern versions of spreadsheets such as Microsoft's Excel.
Using the spreadsheet as a platform, the student is lead to a position where they can write virtually a stand-alone program to support a simple or application, even from a position of little previous spreadsheet or computing experience. At the same time as spreadsheets, a number of computer packages have been developed that parallel business and educational applications. Spreadsheet assignments offer concrete ways to explore abstract concepts in mathematics and other subjects.
For more information check out this website:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheets
Using the spreadsheet as a platform, the student is lead to a position where they can write virtually a stand-alone program to support a simple or application, even from a position of little previous spreadsheet or computing experience. At the same time as spreadsheets, a number of computer packages have been developed that parallel business and educational applications. Spreadsheet assignments offer concrete ways to explore abstract concepts in mathematics and other subjects.
For more information check out this website:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheets
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